


Easy Open

by Helenish



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 20:13:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8859436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helenish/pseuds/Helenish
Summary: “So you and Hunt are a package deal these days,” Bryson says.“Uh,” Benji says, jerking his head up from his computer, ballpoint in his mouth.





	

Ethan lives on protein powder, sprouts and five bean salad and flax seed oil, and bitter greens dowsed in eighteen-dollar mustard and rolled into an ancient grains wrap and Big Red chewing gum. It’s bleak.

The thing is, the base level fitness requirements for the yearly recertification as a field agent are no joke. Benji owns—and uses—a pull-up bar, does his time in the weight room, can run a sub-7 minute mile, do ten flights of stairs at a dead run. But at least he eats like a normal human, toast and eggs, ham sandwiches, pretzels, tacos and grilled chicken and baked pasta and ice cream. 

The first time he invites Ethan over (“You want to, um, come over for dinner or something?”), the corner of Ethan’s mouth twists pensively when Benji puts the plate down in front of him. It’s only sautéed chicken and mushrooms and some garlic bread and greek salad he grabbed at the store, but Ethan looks taken aback. Benji feels—embarrassed, maybe. It hadn’t seemed embarrassing with Ethan leaning against the counter, watching him cut mushrooms, but maybe it was. Ethan ducks his head and picks up his fork and begins to eat.

“It’s really good,” he says; he has seconds. After that, they go to bed. That part feels somewhat less uncertain. They’ve only—been together, Benji calls it, delicately, in his mind—three or four times. He doesn’t want to call it messed around or fucked or anything like that. Maybe that’s how Ethan thinks about it, but he hasn’t said, and Benji hasn’t asked.

The first time it was just—well not _just_ , not really, in Ethan’s hotel ten minutes before Brandt was due back, Benji’s heart feeling like it was about to burst out of his throat, his hands on Ethan, acutely aware he was grabbing at him too tightly, rough when he pulled Ethan in against him by his shirt and tightened his hand on his dick, but Ethan only let out a choked laugh, muttering “fuck me, _fuck_ me,” reaching for him, a clumsy, too dry handjob that made Benji come his fucking brains out, Ethan’s mouth warm against his cheek, just what the fuck, what the _fuck_ was that, Benji asked himself the next day, mopping the long marble hallway of the administrative building, blocking cameras at careful intervals, Ethan’s calm voice in his earpiece saying, “next one is thirty-eight steps, then stop.”

Ethan showed up at the checkpoint twenty minutes late, looking like he’d been in a fist fight, which he probably had.

“You got it, right?” he said.

“’Course I did,” Benji said airily, like he hadn’t spent a terrible fourteen minutes crouched underneath a desk, hammering through sub-menus with Brandt yelling in his ear about how his exit window was closing.

“yeah, good,” Ethan said. Then he said, “See you in Milan,” so Benji guessed it was just one of those things that happened that was a strange one-off that no one ever mentioned again, and felt stupid for not understanding the rules in the first place.

Milan was a clusterfuck; Brandt broke his arm jumping off a houseboat and Ethan totaled two cars and had the fucking nerve to complain that Benji’s driving speed wasn’t steady enough for him to be able to time his jump off the bridge,

“I have been going exactly 87 miles per hour for the past two minutes,” Benji told him angrily, just before Ethan boosted himself out the window and disappeared and the truck behind them veered out to the right, forcing Benji into the opposite lane, facing oncoming traffic.

“Nice,” Ethan said, when he saw the car, the long angry gouges that ran the entire length of the car, the caved-in passenger-side door, window shattered, side mirror missing. His voice actually sounded kind of admiring. Or did it? The whole thing, Benji had to admit to himself, was fucking with his head.

*

There was nothing in the safe house in Poland except a box of old rations, some worn clothes three sizes too big, and a deck of cards missing the three of spades. Ethan grinned up at him when Benji came out onto the stone balcony,

“yeah, shut up, they don’t fit you either,” Benji said, and turned up the cuffs on his shirt for the third time. They played cards, Gin Rummy and then Snap, which Benji taught Ethan, and then Bullshit, which—

“How are you so bad at lying,” Benji said, “aren’t you, you know, a spy?”

“So ‘re you,” Ethan said.

“Yeah, but I’m winning,” Benji said.

Ethan was leaning back in the sprung deck chair, wearing a t-shirt that gapped open at the neck, showing his collarbone, the point of his shoulder. He was barefoot, the surprisingly delicate curves of his ankles poking out of a pair of loose grey pants, cuffed up sloppily.

“Was it, um—my turn?” Benji said, becoming aware that he’d been staring.

“Yes,” Ethan said softly, his entire body lax and open, cards dangling from his fingers.

They left the windows open when they fucked, so the spring air was soft and warm on Benji’s back.

“Want to go on top?” Ethan said, after they had been kissing for a while, their clothes half open and crumpled, Ethan flushed, a warm suck-mark on his chest. Benji pushed up off him to get a better look. He was serious. “Well?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Benji said. “Obviously. But—“

“Med kit,” Ethan said, and then rolled Benji over and lifted off him to go get it.

“God,” Ethan said, when Benji got inside him, voice low and stunned. Benji stared at the back of Ethan’s neck, wishing he could see his face, and made himself not ask, are you okay, is this okay, do you want to stop, anything that would make Ethan, who insisted on unflinchingly doing everything the hard way, make Benji fuck him raw. “I’m fine,” Ethan said, anyway. “Stop worrying.”

Benji leaned down over him, put his hand flat on the mattress next to Ethan’s. They fit together easily, Benji’s mouth brushing against the back of Ethan’s shoulder. He heard Ethan take a breath—to complain, probably, so he folded one arm across Ethan’s chest and fucked into him and—it felt good, a low rushing heat building in the base of his spine, as Ethan shuddered and moved underneath him. Benji fucked him, slow and hard, for as long as he could, listening to his own hoarse breathing, the way Ethan’s breath caught in his throat when he came.

He was so quiet: what a weirdo, Benji thought affectionately, in the moment before he came himself.

They ate crackers and jam and tinned fish in the kitchen afterwards and it was terribly normal, much like any of the other long afternoons he’d spent with Ethan waiting for the next part of the plan, or extraction, or just pretending to be nobodies on a train, except for the wild scrapes of beardburn on Ethan’s jaw and throat.

The bed was—

“ugh,” Benji said.

“I’ll take that side,” Ethan said, stoically, but he looked awfully unhappy about it for a person whom Benji had personally seen walk barefoot through sewer tunnels.

Benji woke up when a distant train passed, whistle screaming, and found Ethan’s cheek against his shoulder, a bony knee poking into his shin. He sighed and shifted, rolled slightly onto his side to try to find a comfortable position, and Ethan rolled too, tucked himself in neatly to the bend of Benji’s hips, the small spoon.

“What—“ Benji said weakly, but Ethan was asleep, his chest moving evenly under Benji’s palm when Benji let his hand settle against curve of Ethan’s ribs. Ethan hadn’t left him anywhere else to put it.

The wind whipped and howled against the outside of the house, trees clattering. Ethan sighed, a soft huff. Benji was pleasantly warm, his elbow comfortably slotted into the curve of Ethan’s waist; he fell back asleep between one breath and the next.

*

Were they fucking? Benji asked himself in Brazil. Once was a fluke. Three or four or—or five, preferably—was a pattern. Twice was—nothing, probably, Benji told himself, just blowing off steam. Then Ethan dragged himself over the side of the speedboat and dropped onto the floor, chest heaving.

“We should go,” he said. There were coral scrapes on his ankles and thighs and stomach, just above the waistband of the very small, green-striped trunks he was wearing.

Benji stepped over him and fired up the motor.

“You got it?” he said. Ethan’s eyes were closed, soaking wet hair falling across his forehead, but he smiled, wide and happy, and Benji spun the wheel, warm air battering against his face as he pushed the throttle. They dropped the package just past lunchtime, and by sundown they were making out, tipsy on Mai-Tais in a hotel room in a two star resort hotel, kissing on top of the covers of one of the beds, Ethan’s mouth cool and a little sweet.

“I don’t have—um, any stuff—a condom, can I blow you?” Ethan said, between kisses,

“Yeah, that’s—sure,” Benji said.

“I can hold my breath for three and a half minutes,” Ethan said, in a rush. Benji laughed, he couldn’t help it,

“I know,” he said, “probably longer—“

“Probably,” Ethan agreed, grinning sharply and unbuckling Benji’s belt one-handed.

Ethan’s mouth was hot and soft and wet and it was fucking great before he even did anything, just the feel of him working his mouth down over Benji’s dick, his hands warm and tight on Benji’s thighs. Maybe he lasted more than three minutes, he thought, afterwards, but it didn’t seem like it at the time, fucking into Ethan’s mouth, hurtling forward into an orgasm that made his nerves spark and convulse, left his tongue a little numb.

He lay on the bed, winded. Ethan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and reached across to the bedside table, sluggd back the last of his drink, ice cubes clinking in the glass.

“Sorry, I probably should have—“ Ethan put down the glass “—uh, said something before I—“ Benji said suavely. Ethan shrugged. His hair was falling into his eyes; he needed a haircut again, and his shirt was hanging open, off one shoulder, collar still crisp, there was a dark layer of stubble on his jaw, he looked—

“Let me just,” Benji said. He couldn’t hold his breath for three minutes or anything, but he made Ethan beg for it, rocking up underneath him while Benji gripped his hips and pushed him back down, and Ethan cried out when he came this time, his voice hoarse.

*

Back in DC, he told himself it was probably just one of those things that happened in the field sometimes. Just because he’d never French kissed a coworker before it didn’t mean it didn't happen all the time. It happened to Ethan probably all the time, Benji thought sourly, thinking of the way the other techs used to straighten at their desks, mutter, “Shit, who’s that?” whenever Ethan had brushed down the hallway to lean over Benji’s desk and ask if he could take a look at something, usually something Benji wasn’t supposed to know about and didn’t have clearance for.

The thing is, he’d never been able to say no to Ethan—or. Ethan asked, and it had been easy to say yes.

*

It’s gonna get weird at work, _don’t be weird_ , Benji told himself, and he wasn’t. Ethan was weird; he brought Benji a green juice at ten o’clock at night, looking warm and windblown.

“Where—“ Benji said, a little blurrily.

“Thailand,” Ethan said, and then, “that juice place two blocks over on Third.”

The drink was very green, the color of garter snakes and new grasshoppers.

“Thanks,” Benji said tentatively.

“It’s—“ Ethan leaned in and checked the clock on Benji’s computer. “Ten twenty eight.”

“Yes,” Benji said. “What happened to your watch?”

“I had to trade it for a ten speed bike,” Ethan said, and then, “I’ll just rest my eyes until you’re finished.” He settled into the desk chair at the next cubicle and kicked his feet up on the desk. There were shallow scratches on his cheek, running down his throat and—Benji would find out two hours later when he tugged Ethan’s shirt off—his chest.

“What happened to you?” he said, rolling his chair towards Ethan, trying to get a better look at the scratches.

“I crashed the bike,” Ethan admitted. “It was, sort of, a chase, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Benji said. Ethan looked sideways down the hall, both ways. Then he slipped an arm around Benji’s back and drew him in for a kiss.

*

So he invites Ethan to dinner and Ethan says yes. Work is quiet, in the way that happens sometimes, a week or two, a month or two when it almost seems as though Benji really is a computer analyst for a quiet firm downtown, leaving at 5:30 so he can hit the gym before dinner. Ethan brings a too-nice bottle of wine and leans in and kisses him quickly on the corner of his mouth, Benji’s knuckles brushing against what is very likely an eight hundred dollar cashmere sweater, black, kitten soft—it’s like Ethan just can’t help himself, Benji catches himself thinking fondly.

*

Luther’s retired; Benji gets a post card from some tropical paradise and tucks it up on the wall of his cubicle. Brandt’s not around much—kicked upstairs, half the time, or in the California office.

“Yeah, I miss it,” he says, one of the few times they run into each other in the lobby. “Being in the field.”

“Do you?” Benji says, and Brandt laughs.

“Maybe not,” he admits. “How’s Ethan?”

Benji feels his ears get hot. “He’s—you know.”

“Yeah,” Brandt says wryly. “Same old.” How many times had they stared at each other—Luther and Brandt and Benji and anyone else who’d met Ethan more than eight minutes before—the unspoken question hanging, how far would they go, for Ethan.

Brandt smiles. “I’m glad you’re watching his back, still.”

“Um, that’s—“ one way to describe it, Benji thinks, almost guiltily.

Later, though, pounding out a half dozen timed laps on the track, he thinks, fuck it, they’re both grown-ups, they’re not hurting anyone, and it’s—nice, every part of it. Benji’s never slept with anyone from work before and it’s an incredible relief not to have to lie, all the time. He’s starting to see that he wasn’t any good at it.

*

Ethan’s working alone most of the time, two or three days away and then back; Benji has clearance, but they don’t talk about it. They get takeout; they watch movies. Ethan likes art movies, weird little indies, slice of life stuff with strangely arbitrary endings. Benji’s being farmed out to half a dozen teams, filling in for just long enough to barely get to know anyone. The work itself is fine; the personality conflicts are more difficult.

“I’m sorry, what?” Benji says, in the top level of a garage underneath a highrise in Sao Paulo, watching Gregson and Cargill sling equipment into the back of the van. “We’re leaving him. We’re just—leaving him?”

Gregson glares at him, tight and unhappy. “The fuck do you propose we do, Dunn, he’s forty stories up, the building’s set to blow in fifteen minutes.”

“We jam the signal, head in through the service entrance, override the elevator lock—“

“You know you’re just here to be the computer tech, right, so I really don’t think—” Gregson begins, and now the bomb’s going to go in fourteen minutes so Benji says,

“You know what, Rich, you just go ahead and relax, I’ll take care of it myself—“ and it’s not even that big a fucking deal, honestly, although Rich complains endlessly about it on the way to the drop point, droning on about how reckless it was while Yang slumps back against the van wall, eyes closed, and Benji tapes up his busted knuckles.

*

They watch the footage on the 60-inch screen at the next weekly. There’s dead silence in the room as two small figures scramble across the roof of the skyscraper, one of them supporting the weight of the other, half dragging him, stumbling across the rooftop. It’s high enough up that the wind is pulling at their clothes, whipping against their faces. The door of the helicopter opens and the smaller figure—that’s Benji—drags the other one—Yang—behind a tall metal vent and dumps him.

Benji’s shirt is untucked and his face is blotchily red; Yang is 6’1” and solidly built and he’d been pretty out of it. The helicopter pilot is a young tough, wearing an immaculate suit. The resolution on the screen is crisp, sharp enough that Benji clearly mouths “ah, shit” as he turns around and sees the pilot closing on him, and then “fuck,” several times, while he’s getting punched. It had seemed fast at the time, but the fight goes on for what feels like an agonizingly long time to have your colleagues watch you getting your arse comprehensively kicked.

On screen, Benji rolls sideways and kicks the tough in the knee—this, unfortunately, looks like an accident, which it was not—and then scrambles up and kicks him in the throat, before dragging Yang the fifteen feet across the roof to the helicopter and boosting him in, getting the thing off the ground about eight seconds before the entire building implodes.

Silence. Director Kagan looks like he just swallowed a lemon. Ethan shoots him a covert thumbs up, eyes crinkling minutely.

“See me in my office, Agent Dunn,” Kagan says. “Six o’clock.”

“Yessir,” Benji says, tucking his head down so he doesn’t have to meet anyone’s eyes.

*

“So what do I—what happens?” Benji says tensely, when Ethan finds him blindly punching buttons at his desk and makes him go outside and sit on one of the long granite benches by the reflecting pool. “Am I getting fired?”

“Nah,” Ethan says, supremely unconcerned, leaning back on the bench and watching Benji rip a seed pod off a bush and shred it open with his thumbnail. “They’d’ve just fired you if they were going to.”

“So, the meeting—“ Benji says tentatively.

“Oh yeah, they’ll rip your head off,” Ethan says. “I didn’t know you knew how to fly a helicopter.”

“Who doesn’t know how to fly a helicopter?” Benji says scornfully.

*

Ethan’s waiting for him in the lobby when Benji stumbles out of the meeting. He’s sitting on one of the long leather benches, reading a thin paperback—Vonnegut, Faulkner, maybe—but he tucks it back into a pocket in his jacket when he sees Benji and stands.

“Is it always like that?” Benji says. They’d lectured him for a while, insubordination, reckless endangerment (“I didn’t endanger Yang any more than he, um, already—um,“ Benji said and then stopped talking) putting his fellow agents and his agency at risk, and so on, while Benji tried to look attentive and contrite but not guilty, and then they’d forced him to walk it through, every detail, for an hour, drawing diagrams and explaining the timeline, how was it, Mr. Dunn, that you knew how to override the elevator lock?

“I learned it here,” Benji said. And the bomb, why hadn’t he disabled it, how _had_ he been able to find Yang so quickly, when had he learned how to fly a helicopter, did he think it was a tech’s job to overrule the direct orders of the senior agent—

“Yeah, in this case, yes, I do,” Benji said tightly, and they’d questioned him for another forty minutes after that, but it had seemed, in a way, already finished.

“Come on,” Ethan says, and takes him home.

Ethan’s apartment is mostly empty with a smattering of modern and dangerous-looking chrome and leather furniture. Ethan gives him a towel and a pile of what turns out to be a pair of cut-off sweatpants and a muscle shirt and leaves him to shower in the (dim, black and teak) bathroom, and, when Benji gets out and shambles into the living room, makes him eat activated almonds while they wait for takeout.

The muscle shirt is—snug. Ethan doesn’t have a kitchen table, just two tall Lucite bar stools in the kitchen, so they’re eating on the couch—

“What,” Benji says, when Ethan’s eyes slide, for the third or fifth time, from his face to his chest. Ethan jerks his chin down and pokes his chopsticks back into the box of noodles.

“Nothing,” he says. Benji eats a mouthful of rice and studies Ethan’s face; an unusual angle, just Ethan’s hair falling forward, the hard lines of his cheekbones. “You look—“ Ethan says to his noodles. “you’re in good shape, that’s all.”

“Uh,” Benji says.

“I know you don’t like to show off about it,” Ethan says.

“I don’t like to—“

“I thought that’s why you dressed like that,” Ethan says, shrugging uncomfortably.

“Pass the um—“ Benji says, gesturing, and Ethan does.

Benji is still jet lagged; he feels his eyelids start to get heavy before they’re even finished eating. Ethan’s place is too cavernous and spare to be cozy, but his mind insists on taking comfort from it anyway, an echo of a hundred meals shared with Ethan in odd and unfamiliar places, in the pockets of time where they’ve been safe, or safe enough.

“Sorry about—“ Benji says, after the third jaw-cracking yawn, but Ethan just shakes his head and says,

“come on,” and guides him down the hallway to the bedroom. The last memory Benji has is how cool the pillow is against his cheek, Ethan flicking off the light.

He wakes up at dawn. Ethan is asleep on the couch, throw blanket draped haphazardly over him, one bare foot sticking out the bottom. As he steps closer, Ethan’s hand snaps out and catches him just above the knee.

“Jesus Christ,” Benji says—it’s so quick—and Ethan’s eyes startle open.

“Sorry,” he says, hand dropping. “Time ‘zit?”

“Um—five, sorry,” Benji says. “I—“

“Let’s go for a run,” Ethan says.

“or not—“ Benji says.

Ethan lends him a pair of shoes and takes him on a punishing five mile loop that ends in wind sprints at a high school football field a few blocks from Ethan’s place, still so early that there’s a low mist over the field. Ethan chases him up the field, runs teasing circles around him, slides in close enough to touch and then darts away, laughing like a complete dick, his shirt wet at the back of his neck, his chest, clinging.

They screw around in the shower, kissing, and then on the bed, Ethan’s mouth open and eager under his, both of them still damp, sliding against each other. Ethan has some kind of pricey lube and condoms in foil packets that are darkly blue-black iridescent, and asks so earnestly, pushing himself up off Benji, his hair falling in his eyes,

“I wasn’t sure if maybe you don’t, um—“ he says. “do that, or—“

“No, I definitely do that,” Benji says, letting himself settle back into the pillows. Ethan’s ears get red. It’s something—an experience, really—to lie back and hook one leg into the crook of Ethan’s elbow and feel Ethan sink slowly into him, watch Ethan’s forehead crease with effort, trying to go slow, perhaps.

“You should—“

“What?” Ethan says, tensing, eyes searching Benji’s face. “I can stop.”

“Calm down,” Benji says. He shifts; Ethan’s breath goes out of him, harsh, wanting. “You should—y’know. Do me,” Benji says. That’s why you bought those fancy fucking condoms, he almost says, but then doesn’t. How should he know who Ethan bought those for; what does it even matter? Ethan’s face crinkles a little, rueful.

“Don’t cheapen the moment,” he says. Benji closes his eyes and makes himself stop thinking about it, shoves down against Ethan and says,

“fuck me—“ ignoring the way his voice shakes.

“Okay, okay,” Ethan says, and does, jerks him off and fucks him in an easy, rolling rhythm, until Benji’s rising up to meet him, the bed creaking beneath them, coming with a hollowed out shout when Ethan grinds in against him and rubs his slick hand up over his dick at the same time.

“Holy shit,” Benji says after, still breathing hard. Ethan’s on his back next to him, fingers still tightly circling the condom at the base of his dick, eyes closed. “That was nice.” When Ethan goes to dump the condom, Benji sees in the bedside table, the box of condoms, full, so newly opened that there’s a navy cardboard crescent labeled ‘ _easy open’_ hanging from one perforated cardboard edge.

The next day there’s a call; they go to Thailand, to New Zealand, to Romania, back to New Zealand, Ethan sprains his wrist, they break into a bank, a secure government facility, a junk yard, Ethan gets in a knife fight, Benji crashes a van, it’s all regular work stuff until Ethan falls asleep with his cheek against Benji’s thigh on the flight home, which: Benji’s seen Ethan sleep before, it’s fine, but he’s more used to startling awake, cotton-mouthed, disoriented, to find Ethan squinting at him from the corner of the cargo hold, eyes shadowed and grey, like the fucking raccoons that used to lurk out by the trash when he was a kid. This time, Ethan throws down his duffle next to Benji just after wheels-up and lies down, shoving his bunched up jacket under his head and falling into sleep almost immediately, his breath deep and slow and steady.

*

“So you and Hunt are a package deal these days,” Bryson says.

“Uh,” Benji says, jerking his head up from his computer, ballpoint in his mouth.

“Shanghai, 45 hours,” Bryson says, dropping a file on the desk. “As you know,” he adds, in a defeated monotone, “there is an expectation that you follow protocol in the field and do not diverge from the mission parameters.”

“Absolutely,” Benji says. “Right. No problem.”

Ethan smiles at him when he gets on the plane, a quiet twist of his mouth. They’re not supposed to know each other. Benji looks down at his boarding pass. (Ethan’s mouth opens softly against his when they’re fucking in the hotel room in the middle of it all, rain splattering against the window.)

*

When they’re on the clock, there’s never any time to talk about it. They screw around—anyone would, right? Benji tells himself. You try spending a week and a half staring at a computer on a houseboat in the Azores waiting for the tracer program to pop, Ethan shirtless, unbruised for once, prowling around in the morning for a solid doorjamb to use for pull-ups, or slicing bruised passion fruit they buy for cheap as the vendors come back from market day in the galley kitchen, or sprawled languidly in the corner of the couch during the heat of the day, eyes closed.

“Wanna get laid?” Benji says after keeping his mouth shut for six and a half days. Ethan grins. He settles back against the couch, his body an open invitation, and Benji starts up from his chair, unable to wait another moment to put his mouth in the spot at the edge of Ethan’s throat that makes his breath unsteady. The floor is uneven, and the couch legs clatter rhythmically as they rub off against each other, kissing messily, slipping sideways on the too-silky cover on the couch.

They lie in the cradle of the couch, catching their breath, after. Ethan sighs, content. There’s a soft breeze washing over them from the open shutters, ocean birds calling faintly, and Benji opens his mouth—really, he does—to ask what they’re doing, what Ethan thinks this is—when the laptop pings.

Benji packs the tech gear and Ethan packs everything else, tosses Benji a clean shirt and trousers, and—it’s work. When could he possibly bring it up, he thinks reasonably to himself, while he’s dictating the command overrides to Ethan through a headset, watching his fingers fly elegantly across the keys on the closed circuit camera. While Ethan is lying beaten half to death on a dusty velvet settee in a safe house with a bag of frozen pierogies on his face?

“I’m thinking about quitting,” Ethan says, from under the bag.

“Quitting getting thrown down stairs?” Benji says, trying to affix a butterfly bandage to a cut in a tricky place near Ethan’s elbow. “Yeah, I think you should.”

“Quitting active duty,” Ethan says.

“Oh,” Benji says, after too long a pause. Ethan pulls the bag off his face. His eye is blackening up fast, and there’s a short, ugly-looking cut on his cheek.

“Let me just—“ Benji says, lifting the anti-bacterial ointment.

“You don’t think I should,” Ethan says, while Benji’s positioning the bandage.

“I think, of course you should stop if you want to, but it’s always seemed as though—“ It’s always seemed like Ethan didn’t know how to be a regular person anymore, but Benji doesn’t want to say that. “It’s not really any of my business at all,” he says.

“Well, that’s not really true,” Ethan says.

“Sorry, what?”

“Because we’re—“ Ethan says.

“Oh,” Benji says, “yes, that.” Ethan looks down. There’s an awful silence. “Look, I didn’t mean—“ Benji says.

“That’s fine,” Ethan says quickly.

“I didn’t know,” Benji says, “that you would ever—consider my opinion.”

“Well, I do,” Ethan says, but there’s an edge of a smile in it, his voice warm.

Then, because Benji’s a stupid fucking shit-for-brains, he says, “I thought maybe it was one of those things, like people sleep with each other on missions all the time but it doesn’t—uh, count.”

The smile drops off Ethan’s face. “I don’t—I’ve never done that,” he says.

“Okay, no,” Benji says. “Of course not.”

“How—” Ethan says. “Why would you think that?”

“I didn’t think anything,” Benji says carefully. “I just wasn’t sure—“

“if I was easy or what—“

“Hey, now, hey, hey hey hey, hey—hey. No one is calling anyone easy,” Benji says.

“Everyone always thinks—“ Ethan says. His face cycles through a half dozen expressions, before settling on the blank, jaw-tightened look that Benji has learned means hurt.

“What?” Benji says.

“Nothing,” Ethan says. He starts to put the first aid kit back together.

“Here, let me—“ Benji says, trying to help, and Ethan pushes the kit over so Benji can tuck back in the ointment and bandage case.

“I’ve only slept with four people,” Ethan says abruptly.

“Oh,” Benji says.

“Well,” Ethan says, nodding at him. “five.”

“I see,” says Benji, who has slept with five people in the past eight months: semi-serious relationship who dumped him because of his shitty schedule; rebound hookup; friends with benefits thing; one night stand, and—Ethan.

“I’d wanted to, with you, for a while,” Ethan says. “Sorry if I wasn’t very, um, clear about it. I’m not—I haven’t done this very often.”

“No, yeah, I know, yeah,” Benji says, like an idiot, “that’s okay,” but Ethan just nods, not meeting his eyes.

They finish the rest of it in professional silence. Ethan, not especially chatty on a good day, is terse, but he also has a dislocated shoulder, shoved back into the socket by Benji in a penthouse apartment after Ethan slams a glass of very expensive whiskey, so Benji can’t assume it’s something he said. He finds himself opening his mouth—crunched into the fold-away seat of a stolen minivan as it careens around the corner, or sprinting through shin-deep water in the Stockholm sewer system—and closing it again.    

He doesn’t hear from Ethan for more than a week after they get back. He doesn’t notice at first, and then he does, and then he’s worried and then he decides it’s not important and then he gets a little—annoyed, maybe. Frustrated. Ethan will get in a fist fight on top of a fucking bullet train but he won’t even dump Benji face to face which—.

“Are you dumping me?” he says, in Ethan’s office. Ethan flinches, even though Benji knows his office is soundproof.

“I—“ Ethan says. He’s going to say yes, Benji realizes, in some roundabout way, _I think it’s for the best_ or _I don’t think this is a good idea_.

“Why?” Benji demands, his voice too loud. Ethan looks away. “Why? I didn’t do anything.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Ethan says, a crackling bitter undertone.

“What?” Benji says slowly.

“It’s fine,” Ethan says. “You didn’t think I was—“ he hesitates, and then corrects himself, “it was—“

“Don’t tell me what I think,” Benji says.

“You said,” Ethan says stubbornly. “It’s just a thing we do on missions.”

“I said I didn’t know,” Benji says, throwing out his hands. “How could I know?” He looks around for a chair to throw himself into but the only thing in the office is Ethan’s stupid standing desk.

Ethan’s face pinches unhappily. “You’re—a lot younger than I am,” he says inexplicably. “And there’s—“ then he mutters something that sounds like “hook-up culture.”

“Stop reading three-year old Time Magazines you find in airline seat pockets,” Benji says. “Hook-up culture isn’t a thing, I’m forty-four—“

“And you haven’t—you know,” Ethan says.

“Haven’t what?”

“Haven’t—gotten married—“ Ethan mumbles, eyes wild.

“What?” Benji says weakly.

“That’s not what I meant,” Ethan says.

“What—what, uh, what did you mean?” Benji says. “You know what, never mind. I travel for work every other week, I can’t tell anyone what I’m doing, ever, I’m a terrible liar, I’m at work 14 hours a day but you’re right, there must be something really wrong with me because I’m otherwise such a fucking catch, a secretive workaholic who never returns phone calls and screams in his sleep—“

“You do?”

“Only sometimes,” Benji admits crossly, “but it scares people, so—“    

“You never said,” Ethan says.

Benji shrugs, feeling raw.

“You always seemed so—normal,” Ethan says.

“To who?” Benji mutters, but Ethan smiles, soft.

“It had sort of been a long time for me,” Ethan says. “Since I was, um, normal. You made it look—maybe, worth trying a little.”

“But you’re dumping me,” Benji reminds him.

“Because you said it wasn’t—we weren’t—“ Ethan begins, and then a rumpled analyst shoves open the door without knocking and says,

“Ethan. Cyprus.” She sees Benji and says, “Good, you’re here.” She’s cradling an open laptop in one arm, which she puts down on Ethan’s desk.

“We just got back,” Ethan says, but he leans forward and looks at the laptop, frowning.

*

The plane is a corporate jet maintained by the IMF through a shell corporation. Benji takes an Uber, a friendly guy in a little red Corolla who talks to him about baseball the whole time. He’s still futzing with his luggage in the hangar, searching through his bag to check for the fourth time that his wallet is in there, halfway to dumping out the fucking thing, when Ethan rolls in, parking just outside, in a burnished grey BMW, so dark it looks nearly black, the engine mumbling contentedly.

It’s a cool night, fog rolling across the air field, and as Ethan walks into the hangar, he sharpens, as if coming into focus, black wool suit pants, black trench coat, a slight, knife-sharp figure sliding out of the mist, just as Benji locates the pair of headphones he lost three weeks ago in the fourth pocket of his crumpled cargo pants.

On the plane, Benji watches Ethan take off his jacket and tuck his shoulder bag under the seat, thinks about all those other small, half-started relationships, how easy it had been to let them fall apart, how much easier it had been to be alone. And then Ethan, reckless, intense, unafraid; all in, from the beginning. Benji should have been prepared; he’d known Ethan for years.

The plane lurches into motion, taxiing towards the runway. Ethan sits down next to him. Benji’s been on the plane for five minutes and already feels creased, jet-lagged in advance, but Ethan is unruffled, his shirt beautifully crisp.

“You’re very—“ surprising, Benji wants to say. “I’m sorry,” he says, instead.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ethan says, and Benji presses on, wanting to explain himself somehow, unable to find the words. “You can be so—I mean, married?“

Ethan’s silent for a long moment; when he speaks, his voice is strained and brittle. “Isn’t that just what you do?” he says. “You meet someone that you—love, you fall in love, you get married because you want to—to stay with them, is that so wrong?”

“No,” Benji says. Ethan’s staring fixedly at his knees. “No,” Benji says again. “Ethan.“ He touches Ethan’s hand, clenched tightly at his side. “No, it’s not. It’s—that’s how you are; I should have been paying better attention.”

“Some people find it charming,” Ethan says, a little stiffly. He hesitates, and then adds, in a clipped off, uncertain voice. “Romantic.”

“I never said I didn’t,” Benji says—lets himself say. Ethan smiles: not his usual grim, sullenly dangerous one, but a toothy, almost over-eager smile that lights up his whole face. Benji would jump out of a helicopter for him. Benji has already jumped out of a helicopter for him. Twice, actually.

The plane lifts off.


End file.
